Anne Romine

Born and raised in South St. Louis, Anne Romine completed a bachelor's degree in French literature and translation at Truman State University. She earned her M.A. in History at Saint Louis University in 2008, and as a doctoral candidate under the direction of Dr. Thomas Madden, her research focuses on chivalry, warfare, and crusade in the late middle ages. Her dissertation, entitled "Saving Chivalry: Fourteenth-Century Crusaders, Philippe de Mézières, and the Order of the Passion," examines the drive for chivalric reform that grew out of the Hundred Years' War. Philippe de Mézières, a highly placed crusade enthusiast at the French court, argued that a joint venture to retake the Holy Land - and the righting of priorities within Christendom that this would involve - would be the best way to put an end to the Anglo-French conflict. The crusade army would be spearheaded by the Order of the Passion, a proposed knightly order whose creation was Philippe's life's work. Philippe's emphasis on crusade as the rightful business of Christian knights was accompanied by a program for reforms in both personal morals and military discipline that would mold Order members into the best knights anywhere, in both virtue and might. In an era when many voices, in both France and England, were critical of the knightly class - both their savage conduct of warfare and its lack of results - Philippe's writings provide a key insight into the "chivalric reform movement" by highlighting the interconnection of Christian morality and military effectiveness.

The journal Allegorica published Anne's article "Phillippe de Mézières (c.1327-1405) and the Controversy Over Crusader Dress in the Fourteenth Century" in 2013. She has also presented her research at international conferences in Leeds, England, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, as well as at the Second International Symposium on Crusade Studies hosted at Saint Louis University. She received a travel award in 2012 that funded a summer stay in Paris, which allowed her to consult seldom-seen texts pertaining to the Order of the Passion. Once her dissertation is completed in summer 2015, her next research project will expand on its themes by studying the relationship between the careers of French knights in the late fourteenth century and their professed military and social values.

Within the department, Anne has served for three years as an adjunct instructor. She previously held teaching and research assistantships, as well as a one-year research assistantship with the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. She served through spring 2014 on the planning board of the Crusades Studies Forum, and has helped organize several conferences and special events.

Anne can often be found in her kitchen, cooking from Julia Child and plotting her next trip to France. She also makes a minor sport of local microbrewery conoisseurship. If a philosophical argument arises at a party about who makes the best pizza in Saint Louis, she's the one who started it.